I'm pretty sure 'The Glass Castle' isn't an exemplar text for Common Core

Another board meeting vignette.

The District was in an uproar over Common Core all last year, and every board meeting seemed to feature yet another Powerpoint explication of the Common Core "shifts."

The middle school presentation included samples of student work, and that was great. You could actually get a sense of how the school was interpreting Common Core, and of what the kids were being asked to do.

One of the work samples was a short student response paper using "evidence from the text" (the text in question being The Glass Castle) to support the point that "some people have a different perspective on what is safe and best for people."

That was the student's "theme statement." Some people have a different perspective on what is safe and best for people.

The student's response was well-written, so that was a pleasure to see.

But I was annoyed.

I hadn't read The Glass Castle, and I knew nothing about the book, but since I'd like our kids to be able to read something written before 1990 (and not just The Outsiders, which C. read in 4th grade and then again in 7th), I stood up during Public Comments & took everyone to task.

Why are they reading The Glass Castle, I said.

Why can't they read the classics?

Why can't they read the classics ever.

The school board had the same question.

After that, I decided it was time for me to finally read The Glass Castle myself. I'd been planning to read it for a while, and I figured now was the time.

So I did, and....wow.

Another case of "always worse than you think." (Family motto.)

The Glass Castle turned out to be a terrific book. But it is radically not a book for 6th-grade students.

When I got to the part where the neighbor boy tries to rape the little 8-year old girl and the next day she has to look up the word 'rape' in the dictionary, I thought . . .

I don't know what I thought.

"Holy cow," maybe.

Me being me, my next thought was: doesn't this call for an email?

An email to somebody?

Somebody in charge?

Somebody in charge who would maybe put in a word for having the kids read Tom Sawyer or Red Badge of Courage or Call of the Wild or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or, really, just about any good book that does not include a scene in which Grandma Erma gropes and paws at her 9-year old grandson's crotch and the dad's reaction is "Brian's a man, he can take it."

I mulled the whole thing over for a couple of weeks. I was still reading the book, and practically every page brought something even more unmentionable than the page before, to the point where I was having trouble imagining what exactly I was going to say if I did write an email, especially given the fact that the people I would be writing to, or about, are people I like. (Our current middle school administrators are both menshes.)

Finally I decided somebody else was going to have to deal with it.

I doubt anyone in the middle school has actually read The Glass Castle, probably including the student who wrote about it. All of the evidence-from-the-text came from the book's opening pages.

The Glass Castle is an amazing book, magical. A magical book about child abuse. (As crazy as that sounds. It is a magical book about child abuse.)

"Some people have a different perspective on what is safe and best for people" isn't the half of it.

oh, the humanity!

Having taught English composition to college freshman for the past two years in the context of a traditional English course, I conclude that: the humanities are kaput.

Not an original observation, I know, but until now I hadn't seen the phenomenon up close.

The humanities are not kaput at the college where I teach, by the way. The college where I teach is a holdout for traditional English (and grammar!): an outpost. But the very fact that traditional English is holding on at my college may actually be evidence for the kaputness of the humanities elsewhere.

(Which reminds me....a while back I downloaded a series of lectures on American literature by a professor at Yale. I should find those and listen to one just to see.)

This week I have been stumbling upon near-daily evidence that the humanities as we once knew them are no more.

Yesterday, for instance, I came across a film professor at Appalachian State University, I think it was, explaining that the purpose of education is to expose 18-year olds to "diversity," thus eliminating "hate."

Seriously.

College eliminates hate via affirmative action enrollment.

(What is the purpose of college for the diverse people whose presence on campus is so educational for their white counterparts? Not addressed.)

Then today I listened to a 10-minute Stanford podcast, an interview with a Stanford English professor, on the Book of Genesis. I was excited to discover the podcast, which I'd forgotten I had, because I teach 3 chapters from the Book of Genesis in my composition class. Also, I'm reading the Bible (trying to), and I'm interested in the Bible.

But the interview was a great disappointment. Mostly, the professor spent his time talking about why anyone should want to read the Book of Genesis in the first place.

To be fair, the interviewer had pretty much asked, going in, "Why on Earth are we reading the Book of Genesis?" She asked nicely, but the fact that she asked at all: more evidence the humanities are dead. Dead or not doing their job.

Of course, given the fact that the humanities are not doing their job, "Why are we reading the Book of Genesis?" is a legitimate question. Maybe even the question. I myself would have liked to hear a scholarly explanation of why an educated person should read the Bible. For instance, I'm especially curious about how ignorance of the Bible affects my ability to read the many novels that draw on the Bible.

But the professor didn't get into that. He did make the interesting observation that everyone has an opinion about the Book of Genesis whether they think they do or not (not his words), but he didn't develop that idea, either.

Instead, he transitioned to a lengthy reflection on the fact that so many people take the Bible seriously in a non-English-professor sort of way -- "and that's OK," he said.

But not completely OK, apparently. The reason to read the Book of Genesis, he finally concluded, is to show students that it is possible to talk about contested material in a civil and dispassionate manner, and that is the goal of a college education.

Civil discourse is the goal of a $60K/year Stanford education.

That's going to come as news to parents, most of whom likely think -- if they think of it at all -- that civil discourse is the prerequisite for a college education, not the goal. Minding your manners in class: something a Stanford student should know how to do going in.

Then tonight I came across the following, also on the Stanford website:

What do you think of when you think of the word "grammar"? ... "Usually, our minds go to those unending rules and exceptions, those repetitive drills and worksheets..." (720). This formal grammar is "the deadly kind of grammar," the one that makes us anxious....

So film professors at Appalachian State are curing hate, English professors at Stanford are curing religious conflict, and composition theorists are attending to anxiety about grammar while bludgeoning the rules, drills, and worksheets that would prevent anxiety about grammar developing in the first place.

English as a discipline seems to be gone.

bring back English

A university funded, award-winning undergraduate Honors thesis at NYU:

Shahida Arabi, The Show That Must Go On: Gender Performativity in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Shakespeare’s As you Like It*
The Show That must Go On: Gender Performativity in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Shakespeare’s As You Like It Shahida Arabi, English
Sponsor: Professor Elaine Freedgood, English

Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity asserts that gender is a performance that is constantly problematizing itself. using this idea as a basis for my research, and combining literary criticism with performance studies and gender studies to guide my analysis, I explore how gender is theatricalized and problematized in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice within their respective historical contexts. The body in both texts serves as the site where cultural meanings are inscribed and performed through various stages of gender signification, including cross-dressing, drag, and the rituals of marriage. The body exerts a performative labor that exposes and subverts the very performances being staged. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice emphasizes the role of marriage in successfully “passing” for a woman in eighteenth-century England, while Shakespeare’s As You Like It reveals a world of drag and cross-dressing that both destabilizes and exposes the performativity of gender through the vehicle of Rosalind’s body. Rosalind’s doubling performances construct several layers of gender performance, reflecting the nuanced roles of sixteenth-century English women and the dubious nature of the gendered body on the Shakespearean stage.. These performances, engineered through clothing and language, are partially negated by Rosalind’s references to her biological body, even as they are reinforced by her defamation of the female sex. The financial necessity of marriage in eighteenth-century England compels female characters in Pride and Prejudice to perform their gender through marriage rather than through the stage props of clothing or weapons. Consenting to or refusing a marriage proposal could secure social mobility or undercut social and class expectations. The narrative, however, complicates seemingly subversive performances by reducing characters to the physicality of their bodies, or granting physical agency to “flattened” or one-dimensional characters. These two texts, despite the difference in historical era, problematize this timeless discourse of a stable gender identity.
Inquiry: A Journal of Undergraduate Research

* supported by Dean’s undergraduate research Fund † winner of Phi Beta Kappa Albert Borgman Prize for Best Honors Thesis

think

from Glen:

I don't know whether the Texas GOP is objecting to the program of political indoctrination or the deprecation of knowledge, both of which are labeled "critical thinking" by progressives to give themselves political cover, but either way, I'm with the GOP on this one.

On arrival, our school district's new "science specialist" sent a letter home to parents in which she claimed to be specially trained in "progressive education" and "constructivist learning," whose goal for our science classes was, "to instill in students a commitment to defending the environment."

The notion of "critical thinking" was central to her mission, and I happened to see one of her classroom critical thinking tests. It asked, "How many of the following human activities cause global warming? (check all that apply)". Not "are claimed by some to cause" but "cause." Critical thinking apparently consists in regurgitating the approved answers, not pondering the questions, when the answers are provided by a sage who's progressive. The options were such things as "driving cars", "consuming non-local foods", "non-sustainable manufacturing", etc. The right answer from a "critical thinking" perspective was, of course, all of the above.

I wondered at what point knowledge of physics, chemistry, or biology might play a role in the class. Mere knowledge was "fine," but engaging in environmental activism was worth extra credit toward your grade. What about chemistry experiments at home or go see the meteor collection at a museum? Good activities but not relevant to your science grade. What IS applicable to your science grade? Get involved in environmental activism, find examples of non-green behaviors among your neighbors and complain, or participate in an Earth Day activity.

At the end of the year, the top science prize awarded by her was not to the kid who knew the most about physics or chemistry but to the "Most Green" student. The prize was a coffee mug. Just what a 10-yr-old girl needs most, a coffee mug, right? Well, not just any coffee mug. The "science specialist" and expert on "critical thinking" told us from the podium that this mug displayed a very important map of the world that showed "which parts of the world will be under water in 2050." Wow. We already have the map showing where in Appalachia to buy your future beachfront property. It's right there in the shaking hands of the little green girl with the latte. I wonder how many critical thinkers are buying.

[snip]

And my brother-in-law, a Life Flight helicopter paramedic for years, wanted to get a nursing degree so he could spend more time at home raising his kids. California required nursing students to pass a "critical thinking" class to get their degree. Sounds like a good idea. And who best to teach our nurses to think critically? Dr. House-style clinical pathologists? Physicists? Experts in statistical analysis? No, when mistakes may cost lives, we turn to--the English Department.

So, he took the class from one of the staff marxists and made the mistake of challenging some of her claims. He thought the point of critical thinking was to engage in back-and-forth discussions, reasoning about an issue from various perspectives. BIG mistake.

The critical thinking instructor graded assignments on "insight," which is to say, how much evidence for leftist dogma the student managed to "discover" during an assignment. I begged my brother-in-law to stop analyzing and pretend to experience leftist religious conversion. For the final assignment, which was, inevitably, "to analyze from a marxist-feminist perspective," he did as I suggested, and got an A in the class.

But not just an A, but a gushing letter from the instructor about how utterly inspiring it was to see the light of understanding finally dawning in his formerly benighted middle-aged, white, male brain. In the end, her urging him to "think more critically" had enabled him to see the "class contradictions" and "injustice inherent in" blah, blah, and he had given her hope for the future.

So this is what state-enforced "critical thinking" means in California: deprecation of factual knowledge and promotion of various progressive theories.

The NY Times is counting on a lack of actual critical thinking skills by its fan base. They label a collection of bad ideas "critical thinking," then label anyone who opposes those ideas opponents of critical thinking. Ha, ha, those Texan rubes. What's the point in even arguing with people like that? (So now, in Orwellian fashion, we don't have to.)

I'm quite sure I would part company with the Texas GOP over other issues, but on this one, they're right. Real critical thinkers should be saying no to phony critical thinking.

wrong again - the case of Microsoft Word and passive voice

Elaborating on a comment I just wrote.... I have begun to feel that English teaching may be in worse shape than math.

(fyi: I frequently have students in my classes who tell me: "I love math, I hate English." Is that evidence that math is being taught better than English? I think it's possible.)

A fair amount of the content taught in English classes and covered in composition texts is misleading, confusing, or, in some cases, simply wrong. My favorite example may be the injunction against using the passive voice, which belongs to the simply wrong category.

Passive voice is essential to fulfilling the known-new contract. When you're writing with the known-new contract in mind, and you should pretty much always be writing with the known-new contract in mind,^* passive voice isn't just 'OK,' it's required: passive voice is good writing when you need it. Passive voice is so useful that if it didn't exist, somebody would have to invent it.

In my classes, of course, (and this is something the composition texts don't seem to have grokked) I don't have to worry about over-use of passive voice. As far as I can tell, students today haven't done enough academic reading to have noticed that passive voice is a common feature of academic writing, so they don't try to produce imitations of academic writing that feature excessive use of p.v.

As a result, far from having to inveigh against over-use of passive voice, I more or less have to teach students what passive voice is in the context of writing. (Writing as opposed to talking & signage, where everyone knows what p.v. is and uses it all the time. e.g.: Schools will be closed tomorrow...)

But when I'm trying to teach written passive voice using a Word file projected onto a screen, Grammar Check keeps dinging me, so I have to explain to my students that, back in the day, when students did read academic books and did try to imitate academic prose via liberal use of passive voice, writing instructors used to tell their students not to use passive voice, and that's where Microsoft Word got the idea from. Microsoft Word thinks passive voice is bad because George Orwell and Strunk & White thought passive voice was bad (my students have never heard of George Orwell or Strunk & White), and college students used to use way too much passive voice, but .... passive voice is not bad, and Microsoft Word is wrong. They should think about the known-new contract and use passive voice as needed.

Speaking of Microsoft, this was the first semester I 'infused' technology into my teaching, by which I mean I figured out how to use the laptop-projector set-up so I could project sentences and paragraphs onto the screen up front. When the class talked about passive voice, Microsoft's objections actually got to be pretty funny. We'd be cruising along, writing our sentences and making them cohere, and DING! Word would put a green squiggle under a passive voice construction.

Then I'd say, "Microsoft Word doesn't want you to use passive voice."

^* I say this with the proviso that all rules are made to be broken...

how to write an English paper

Cruising Purdue University's OWL site for advice on how to write an English paper, I find the following "Timeline":

• Moral Criticism, Dramatic Construction (~360 BC-present)
• Formalism, New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelian Criticism (1930s-present)
• Psychoanalytic Criticism, Jungian Criticism(1930s-present)
• Marxist Criticism (1930s-present)
• Reader-Response Criticism (1960s-present)
• Structuralism/Semiotics (1920s-present)
• Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction (1966-present)
• New Historicism/Cultural Studies (1980s-present)
• Post-Colonial Criticism (1990s-present)
• Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)
• Gender/Queer Studies (1970s-present)

Wayne Booth and a different way to prepare for critical reading

First of all, the correct answer to yesterday's SAT reading comprehension question, the question we're asked to answer without reading the passage the question is about, is A: The author's attitude toward children appears to be one of concern for the development of their moral integrity.

C. and Ed read the question two minutes ago and both chose A. (Debbie and I chose A, too.) Ed is sitting here now basically running through Glen's entire line of reasoning, all 5 points. I'm cracking up!

Of course, getting this answer right is no great feat: according to the research summary I found, 83% of subjects in the Katz and Lautenschlager et al study got it right, too, with no more than 7% of subjects choosing B, C, D, or E. 

Glen and Ed didn't have to get as fancy schmancy as they did, either. (I say that with love!) According to Katz and Lautenschalger as quoted by Iri-Noda-San, all any of us had to do to answer this question was to note that:

“[t]he item just discussed is flawed because not a single incorrect choice characterizes a socially appropriate attitude toward children, whereas the correct choice does (p. 304)”.

Wayne C. Booth (or: I wish kids could be English majors again)

I have never actually read Wayne Booth, I am sorry to say. I intend to.

Back in graduate school I knew just enough about Wayne Booth's work to have been deeply intrigued by his notion of the implied author, and to have spent quite a bit of time thinking about what exactly an implied author might consist of inside a movie as opposed to a book.

Last night, after Debbie arrived fresh from her tutoring adventures bearing news of the Katz and Lautenschlager study, I had a eureka moment: the SAT has an implied author.

The SAT has an implied author, and you need to read the implied author as well as the passages to get the answers right. That's what good readers do.

I have been naturally reading the implied author in SAT reading sections, and so has C. I say "naturally" because I do it without thinking about it, and if I do think about it, I don't take it seriously. When C. and I joke about the "grammatically correct" minority questions in the writing section, we're joking.  We don't see ourselves as having (correctly) interpreted a text.

In fact, I rely upon my understanding of the implied author to such a degree that the single most useful piece of advice anyone ever gave me about SAT reading was LexAequita's observation that SAT reading questions are "picayune in the sense that you'd better start thinking like a 13-year old with Asperger's syndrome." On one level, Lex's advice is about the logic of SAT reading questions, but on another level Lex's advice is about the implied author. The implied author is picayune!

(There's an implied author in the math sections, too.)

These days, of course, no one has heard of implied authors and the like; the formal analysis of literature seems to have disappeared from English departments across the land. I search high and low for close readings of the folk tales and fairy tales I'm teaching, and all I find are Marxist analyses and multiple references to menstruation. I am not going to discuss menstruation with a class full of 18 year old boys (and girls) taking developmental composition. Nor with a class full of 18 year old boys and girls taking non-developmental composition, for that matter.

If I knew how to do a close reading of texts, if I knew more than just a smidgeon about functional linguistics, I bet I could crack the test, as opposed to consistently get the answers right without knowing why I consistently get the answers right.

And I wish I had been able to take a class with Wayne Booth. His students obviously loved him.

test prep

Who teaches kids to read the implied author in a text?

Does anyone?

If you're lucky, an English teacher will show your child how to locate main and supporting ideas in nonfiction texts. And there is a strong focus in many precincts upon identifying an author's "biases." David Mulroy writes about the contemporary preoccupation with argument in The War Against Grammar.

But I think that's about it.

I know a student in a neighboring town, who I worked with briefly on SAT reading. He put a great deal of time and energy into preparing for the test, and his writing and math scores both were in the mid 700s by October, but he could not get his reading score above the low 600s.

That never made sense to me. He and I had read together. He was a good reader, and he was smart.

You see kids like him time and again, and people remark on it. The reading test is the one that can't be tutored; that's the rule.

Now I'm wondering if kids are failing to read the implied author.

I'm also wondering whether it would be a good idea to have students purposely take some critical reading sections without reading the passages. Offhand, such an exercise seems like a good way to reveal the SAT's implied author.

The researchers who've looked into this issue seem to take the view that if a test-taker can answer the questions on a reading passage without reading the passage, the test is invalid.

That strikes me as the wrong way to look at it, although I haven't read the papers. In the studies, students who did best answering questions without reading the passage also scored highest on the test itself, and I think it's at least possible that this research reveals more about the nature of strong readers than it does about the SAT. I am now wondering how many questions I answer not on the basis of the passages but on the basis of the tone, style, grammar, and content in the question sections per se.

I don't know the answer to that, but I'd like to.

the question:
The author’s attitude toward children appears to be one of:
(A) concern for the development of their moral integrity
(B) idealization of their inexperience and vulnerability
(C) contempt for their inability to accept unpleasant facts
(D) exaggerated sympathy for their problems in daily life
(E) envy of their willingness to learn about morality


Katz, S., Blackburn, A. B., & Lautenschlager, G. (1991). Answering reading comprehension items without passages on the SAT when items are quasirandomized. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 51, 747-754.
Katz, S., Johnson, C, & Pohl, E. (1999). Answering reading comprehension items without the passages on the SAT-I. Psychological Reports, 85, 1157-1163.
Katz, S., & Lautenschlager, G. (1994). Answering reading comprehension questions without passages on the SAT-I, ACT, and GRE. Educational Assessment, 2, 295-308.
Katz, S., Lautenschlager, G., Blackburn, A. B., & Harris, F. (1990). Answering reading comprehension items without passages on the SAT. Psychological Science, 1, 122—127.
Millman, J., Bishop, C. H., & Ebel, R. (1965). An analysis of testwiseness. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 5, 707-727.
Powers, D. E., & Leung, S. W. (1995). Answering the new SAT reading comprehension questions without the passages. Journal of Educational Measurement, 32, 105-129.
Pyrczak, F. (1972). Objective evaluation of the quality of multiple-choice items designed to measure comprehension of reading passages. Reading Research Quarterly, 8, 62-72.
Tuinman, J. (1973-74). Determining the passage dependency of comprehension questions in five major tests. Reading Research Quarterly, 9, 206-223.

24/7

Sorry to be AWOL...I am CHAINED TO MY DESK!

(Teaching 2 courses I've never taught before, both of them composition & literature, which means lots of paper reading and lots of reading-reading.)

I'm doing no math at all. None. Not even the SAT Question of the Day.

I'm spending so much time on English literature, fables, folk tales, and short stories that I think I'll just start posting some of the work I'm doing there for the time being.

For starters, here's a fantastic site for English students:

Getting an A on an English paper